Biblical Languages Fonts

In April, 2002, at a conference in Rome, Italy, Logos Research Systems, Inc. and the Society of Biblical Literature agreed to work together to develop high-quality fonts for biblical languages using the latest font standards and technologies.

Tiro Typeworks, a professional type design firm in Vancouver, BC, Canada, was chosen to implement the first series of fonts, covering biblical Hebrew, Greek, and roman transliteration of biblical languages. The Hebrew script, as used in the standard Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia text, was implemented first.

Design goals included:

• On-screen legibility at small point sizes (requiring manual hinting).
• Compliance with the Unicode standard for character encoding.
• Support for OpenType layout on Microsoft Windows (allowing for correct automatic placement of teamin and nikud).

With the financial and/or technical support of other organizations, including the Summer Institute of Linguistics and Microsoft Corporation, a team of technical experts met in person and by email over the course of many months. In July, 2003, the SBL Hebrew font was released and work on SBL Greek begun.

SBL Hebrew

The SBL Hebrew font is, at the time of its release, the finest font available for displaying Biblical Hebrew in Unicode. It has been manually hinted for legibility at small point sizes and was specifically designed to make it easy to distinguish Hebrew characters on-screen while staying true to the best traditions of Hebrew calligraphy and typesetting. It has been extensively tested with Microsoft Corporation's Uniscribe type-layout library. It supports the correct automatic placement of consonants, vowels, accents, and cantillation.

SBL Hebrew is included with Logos Bible Software products built on the Libronix Digital Library System v2.0 and later. (The Libronix DLS system is available for download.) It is available from the Society of Biblical Literature web site.

The user manual for the font is available for download.

Uniscribe

Microsoft Corporation provided valuable technical advice during the development of SBL Hebrew. Some very obscure character combinations of the BHS will not display perfectly in SBL Hebrew except with the Uniscribe USP10.DLL version 1.471 or later. This DLL is distributed with the Libronix Digital Library System v2.1 and Microsoft Office 11.